What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane which is the final goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, "the mucous membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the riches of the infinite." It is a mystery before which the thinker and the artist are alike overcome. Donnay, in his play L'Escalade, makes a cold and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love himself. He forces his way into the girl's room, by a ladder, at dead of night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech: "Everything that touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred. Ah! to think that a thing so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have modelled, which poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy merely because it is the body of one particular woman—what insanity! And yet that is what I feel."[[64]]
That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion which the individual is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is indeed an explanation that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery. That, as we know, was the explanation offered by Schopenhauer. When a youth and a girl fall into each other's arms in the ecstacy of love they imagine that they are seeking their own happiness. But it is not so, said Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to effect a far greater impersonal end: the creation of the future race. The intensity of their passion is not the measure of the personal happiness they will secure but the measure of their aptitude for producing offspring. In accepting passion and renouncing the counsels of cautious prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of Nature. As Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar illusion. The lovers thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly immense personal happiness; they were probably deceived. But they were deceived not because the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more; instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were carrying on the creative work of the world, a task better left undone, as Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he fully recognized.[[65]]
It must be remembered that in the lower sense of deception, love may be, and frequently is, a delusion. A man may deceive himself, or be deceived by the object of his attraction, concerning the qualities that she possesses or fails to possess. In first love, occurring in youth, such deception is perhaps entirely normal, and in certain suggestible and inflammable types of people it is peculiarly apt to occur. This kind of deception, although far more frequent and conspicuous in matters of love—and more serious because of the tightness of the marriage bond—is liable to occur in any relation of life. For most people, however, and those not the least sane or the least wise, the memory of the exaltation of love, even when the period of that exaltation is over, still remains as, at the least, the memory of one of the most real and essential facts of life.[[66]]
Some writers seem to confuse the liability in matters of love to deception or disappointment with the larger question of a metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer's sense. To some extent this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by Renouvier and Prat in La Nouvelle Monadologie (pp. 216 et seq.). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not, dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential error which presided over the creation of the idol, for the idol is only what in all things the ideal is. But to realize the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the great difficulty. We are never justified," they conclude, "in casting contempt on our love, or even on its object, for if it is true that we have not gained possession of the sovereign beauty of the world it is equally true that we have not attained a degree of perfection that would have entitled us justly to claim so great a prize." And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves, that the prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever their flaws, are far greater than we deserved.
We may well agree that in a certain sense not love alone but all the passions and desires of men are illusions. In that sense the Gospel of Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the inspiration of Shakespeare (in the Tempest) and of Calderon (in La Vida es Sueño), who felt that ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream. But short of that large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense that men's other cravings and aspirations escape. On the contrary, it is the most solid of realities. All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex. If we admit the action of sexual selection—as we can scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential accretions[[67]]—love has moulded the precise shape and color, the essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.
If we further reflect that, as many investigators believe, not only the physical structure of life but also its spiritual structure—our social feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and art—are, in some degree at least, also built up on the impulse of sex, and would have been, if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than sexual methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may easily realize that we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion. The whole edifice of life topples down, for as the idealist Schiller long since said, it is entirely built up on hunger and on love. To look upon love as in any special sense a delusion is merely to fall into the trap of a shallow cynicism. Love is only a delusion in so far as the whole of life is a delusion, and if we accept the fact of life it is unphilosophical to refuse to accept the fact of love.
It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of love in the world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings in its own proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to quote a few expressions of thinkers, belonging to various schools, who have pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging significance of the sexual emotions for the moral life. "The passions are the heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world," wrote Helvétius long since in De l'Esprit. "The activity of the mind depends on the activity of the passions, and it is at the period of the passions, from the age of twenty-five to thirty-five or forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts of virtue or of genius." "What touches sex," wrote Zola, "touches the centre of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of others has a sexual origin, Professor Thomas argues (Psychological Review, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and it is love which is the source of susceptibility generally and of the altruistic side of life. "The appearance of sex," Professor Woods Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution," Monist, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was not only the birthplace of affection, the well-spring of all morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the race and an absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find any conscious longing for or active impulse toward a fellow creature." "Were man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of all that spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his Physiology of Mind, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his life." "One seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete; one is more complete," says Nietzsche (Der Wille zur Macht, p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we find it as the greatest stimulant of life.... It is not merely that it changes the feeling of values: the lover is worth more, is stronger. In animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colors, and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a new seductive music. It is not otherwise in man.... Even in art the door is opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in words and sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever, what is left over in poetry and music? L'Art pour l'art perhaps, the quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in their marsh. All the rest is created by love."
It would be easy to multiply citations tending to show how many diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that sexual love (including therewith parental and especially maternal love) is the source of the chief manifestations of life. How far they are justified in that conclusion, it is not our business now to inquire.
It is undoubtedly true that, as we have seen when discussing the erratic and imperfect distribution of the conception of love, and even of words for love, over the world, by no means all people are equally apt for experiencing, even at any time in their lives, the emotions of sexual exaltation. The difference between the knight and the churl still subsists, and both may sometimes be found in all social strata. Even the refinements of sexual enjoyment, it is unnecessary to insist, quite commonly remain on a merely physical basis, and have little effect on the intellectual and emotional nature.[[68]] But this is not the case with the people who have most powerfully influenced the course of the world's thought and feeling. The personal reality of love, its importance for the individual life, are facts that have been testified to by some of the greatest thinkers, after lives devoted to the attainment of intellectual labor. The experience of Renan, who toward the end of his life set down in his remarkable drama L'Abbesse de Jouarre, his conviction that, even from the point of view of chastity, love is, after all, the supreme thing in the world, is far from standing alone. "Love has always appeared as an inferior mode of human music, ambition as the superior mode," wrote Tarde, the distinguished sociologist, at the end of his life. "But will it always be thus? Are there not reasons for thinking that the future perhaps reserves for us the ineffable surprise of an inversion of that secular order?" Laplace, half an hour before his death, took up a volume of his own Mécanique Celeste, and said: "All that is only trifles, there is nothing true but love." Comte, who had spent his life in building up a Positive Philosophy which should be absolutely real, found (as indeed it may be said the great English Positivist Mill also found) the culmination of all his ideals in a woman, who was, he said, Egeria and Beatrice and Laura in one, and he wrote: "There is nothing real in the world but love. One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one never grows tired of loving, nor of saying so. In the worst tortures of affection I have never ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be worthily filled—even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain." And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed her among the most distinguished of her sex, pathetically wrote: "Why can no one love me? I could give more than most women, and yet the most insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say, is the one thing that is supremely worth while. The greatest and most brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote The Imitation of Christ or The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. And how many others!